Compare the ways in which Plath and Hughes write about settings and landscapes. In your response, you must include detailed discussion of at least two of Plath's poems.

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Compare the ways in which Plath and Hughes write about settings and landscapes. In your response, you must include detailed discussion of at least two of Plath's poems.

In the poem Tulips by Sylvia Plath, the speaker finds herself moving towards the freedom and purity that lies in death, symbolized by the hospital’s whiteness; however, the vivid redness of the tulips, which represents the living, colorful world, forcefully pulls her back to the painful reality. These symbolic uses of colors, explore the speaker’s ultimate desire to be free from a life filled with the bondage of her loved ones and her profound responsibility as a wife and a mother. In the poem, whiteness may represent freedom and tranquility to the speaker. While the speaker is lying on the hospital bed, she is "learning peacefulness" in her silent freedom. The whiteness of the hospital room’s walls, of the nurses’ caps, and of the pillow on which she rests creates a world of serenity and stillness that separates her mind and physical body from her miserable reality. As a result, she feels herself detaching from her social and moral duties. In the speaker’s mind, the whiteness around her is so pure that she feels like “nobody” in it. She wants  " nothing to do with” her husband and child and their hurtful “little smiling hooks." She yearns to reach for the liberation from life and to fall into the eternal peacefulness. Through the admiration and experience of the whiteness, the speaker expresses her intent to die. As the whiteness stands for the liberation that the speaker seeks, the redness of tulips acts as the reminder of her burden and responsibility in the world outside the hospital room. The speaker sees the tulips' redness as a source of danger because "it hurts [her]" and threatens her liberation. She feels it like "red lead sinkers round [her] neck." Its appearance has woken her from her numbness and brought her back to the painful reality that she is not ready to confront. It speaks to her "wound" and "upsets" her mind with its lively color. The vivacity of the tulips’ redness ruins her peacefulness. That redness is  opposed to the whiteness of hospital room; it corresponds with life and consciousness that exist in contrast to the speaker’s fantasy of perpetual peace. By denying the presence of the vibrant redness of the tulips, the speaker simply denies her current vitality and yearns for the ultimate freedom, which is death.

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 A comparison to Plath's poem 'Tulips' is Hughes' poem 'Red' which is similar to Plath's theme of tulips in her poem in which the red contrasts with the whiteness of the hospital.  I believe Hughes wrote this poem about Plath and thus has used 'Red' and 'blue' possibly to describe Plath's view of life and character from the day they got married and lived in their house. In the beginning of Red, it defines Plath's favourite colour that seems to wrap her entire life and movement. The vivid colour of 'blood-red' may constitute a certain image caused in life that ...

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